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Comment by drspacemonkey | Hacker News Reader

Real estate on the Washington side of the border is insanely cheaper. As soon as you cross the border, prices skyrocket and just keep going up until you hit downtown Vancouver.

Seriously, our affordability problem is pretty much at crisis levels. People who argue that we should increase density aren't wrong, but we're already building towers as fast as we can. And the majority of those suffer from substandard, shoddy construction. We call it 'leaky condo syndrome'. And even those are selling for $750k+ for under 500sqft.

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Vancouver is a wonderful city so I can really understand why you want to keep everyone from finding out :)

But go see San Francisco if you want to understand an affordability crisis. Vancouver is reasonable in comparison.

Yes, the cost of living in San Francisco is about twice that of Vancouver. But salaries in Vancouver less than half that of San Francisco, so affordability is worse overall.

Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE a stronger tech sector here (especially as a developer). We desperately need an industry other than real estate and film. But I just don't see how that can happen without a fundamental shift that just isn't happening anytime soon.

> just keep going up until you hit downtown Vancouver

And it doesn't stop there. West Van is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Canada.

Indeed; look how well that's worked for Manhattan. /s

Realistically, density doesn't seem to ever drive down housing prices in the long term. All it does is increase the value of land tremendously, and thus push local home ownership out of reach of everyone but the ultra-wealthy.

I think that cause and effect might be backwards - people only ever lay out the large upfront expense to build density when the land becomes valuable enough. And that only happens when people are clamoring to live in the same area.

If you then refuse to build up, it makes the affordability much, much worse.

> If you then refuse to build up, it makes the affordability much, much worse.

How? If you've balanced jobs/wages against housing supply via standard planning practices, then you should be able to tweak demand.

If demand is still high, density just drives prices higher, and shifts the entire housing economy to a rent-seeking one.

Furthermore, the real-estate market is global, but the housing market is local. My parents own homes in another state that they've never even seen, and merely rent out via a property management company.

As land prices get driven up through density, how do people participating in the local housing market compete with those in the real estate market?

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